Tag Archives: healthy eating

Sweet nothings…..

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I’m finding that portion sizes of recipes are usually way too large and there seems to be a complete obsession with adding sweetness to things in recipes, even on the BBC Good Food Healthy recipes section.

Case in point: yesterday I cooked braised red cabbage. The recipe called for a tablespoon of brown sugar! It didn’t need it, a drop of aged balsamic brought out the sweetness. I made a parsnip dish, the recipe called for a tablespoon of honey! Parsnips are naturally sweet, they don’t need any extra! I made a pear dessert, the recipe called for a tablespoon of honey per person! Again, pears already have natural sugars, but I did add a teaspoonful between us. No wonder so many people are struggling with their weight!

If I had followed the recipes without thinking, we each would have consumed 1/2 a tablespoon of sugar and a tablespoonful of honey. I don’t think the food would have tasted any better for it.

If you can stop having sweeteners in drinks like tea and coffee, then it becomes possible to appreciate the innate sweetness of fruits and vegetables and then the amount of sugar that you need everywhere else in your diet can be dramatically reduced.

Sweet nothings…. Black coffee, herb tea, mineral water, lemon and ginger tea, rooibosh tea – that’s what I’m looking forward to today. Try and leave out the artificial sweeteners altogether, they don’t do your body any favours. Sugar-free does not mean impact-free, your body can still respond as if it was having sugar. Leave the diet coke on the shelf.

Try and make fast day a day of sweet nothings.

5:2 Meal Plan Feb 16 – 22

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We’re on to week 6 of our 5:2 lifestyle and I’m delighted to have got below a virtual milestone this week. On to my next goal!

So my plan for the week ahead. I still have some food left in the fridge – it’s amazing how much less we are eating. So I have to think about how to use up the odds and ends as well as making the most of whatever local seasonal produce I can find and also to keep things simple – I’m not going to be spending much time in the kitchen this week.

My choice of seasonal and locally grown foods for this week include: red cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, butternut squash, leeks, celeriac, parsnips, apples, kiwi fruit, pears, plus clementines from Spain.

I am working on a target of 450 – 500 calories on a fast day and 1200 calories on a feed day – any more than that has to be earned by exercise. The numbers are based on my calculations for losing 1lb a week according to my BMR (Basic Metabolic Rate), as a largely sedentary person of my age, height and current weight. You can calculate your BMR here.

My husband has a target of 600 calories on a Fast Day and 1800 on a feed day. He gets larger portions and tends to eat crackers with soup as well.

I’m not showing breakfast except on fast day, or if I plan to try something new.

Here’s the plan:-

Saturday

  • lunch: Home made pizza – 320 kcal for my portion
    Mixed Leaf Salad with Balsamic Vinaigrette – 50 kcal
    Satsuma – 30 kcal
  • supper: Moroccan Spiced Cauliflower & Almond soup – 160 kcals (for 200 ml BBC Good Food version – mine is lighter)
    Mushrooms and Grilled Back Bacon on Wholewheat Toast, green salad with balsamic dressing
    Glazed Pineapple with Cinnamon Fromage Frais 160 kcal ( BBC Good Food again, my version is lighter, but I haven’t had time to write it up yet!)
  • extras: yes, wine and chocolates, why not?
    I make the pizza dough in my bread maker. I split one batch to make 2 thin crust pizzas, which cuts the calories down enormously.

Sunday

  • lunch: Moroccan Spiced Cauliflower & Almond soup – 160 kcals
    Farmhouse Paté with crispbread, light cole slaw and green salad – 260 kcals
    small piece of cheddar cheese – 10g – 40 kcals
    Fresh fruit salad (apple, pear, blood orange, banana)- 80 kcals
  • dinner: Roast Pork with Seasonal Vegetables – going to try a variation of my healthy Sunday roast this week, using a lean pork fillet joint. I may base it on this recipe (290 kcals) and I’ll add some seasonal veg, like parsnips and red cabbage.
    Chocolate Pear Crisp – 140 kcal (I made this last week and it was yummy, but I think I can improve on it)
  • extras: wine and dark Belgian chocolate (that’s it for treats until next weekend…)
    I’ll make a couple of wholewheat loaves today and freeze one. I’m trying to make sure that the majority of our staple carbs are wholegrain.

Monday – FAST day

  • breakfast: Scrambled Egg with Lean Ham – 120 kcal
  • dinner: Simple Vegetable Soup – 70 kcal
    Asian Poached Chicken
    Vegetable Salad (red pepper, celeriac, carrot, broccoli, spring onion)
    Vietnamese Style Dressing
    Cherry Choc dessert (0% fat fromage blanc, cherries and grated dark chocolate; no sweetener)

Tuesday

  • lunch: Stir-fry pork and vegetables (using leftover from roast)
    Light apple and blackberry crumble
  • supper: Caribbean Butternut Squash Soup
    No-Carb Caesar Salad with Crispy Parma Ham (this is a suggestion in The Fast Diet book, it is a really good idea. I’ll use leftover poached chicken in this).
    fresh fruit and fromage blanc

Wednesday

  • lunch: Leek Risotto with Parmesan Crisps (Nigel Slater recipe) – 250 kcal
    I’ll use the chicken stock from the Asian Poached Chicken for this
    Frozen Cherry Choc dessert
  • supper : Caribbean Butternut Squash Soup
    Farmhouse Paté with light cole slaw and mixed salad – 260 kcals
    light apple and blackberry crumble

Thursday – FAST day

  • breakfast: Porridge with blackberries
  • dinner: Carrot and coriander soup
    Teriyaki Salmon with steamed vegetables
    Clementine

Friday

  • breakfast: Swiss style muesli with grated apple (soak oats overnight, add grated apple in the morning)
  • lunch: Wholewheat Penne Pasta with Duck Ragu (from the freezer)
    fresh fruit salad
  • Carrot and coriander soup
    Tuna and Bean Salad with Feta Cheese
    fromage blanc topped with chopped kiwi and dried cherries

There should be enough tasty variety of food there to keep us both happy – and keep the weight off. I’ll try and add the recipes as I have the time. I’ve got plenty more ideas!

Body Mass Index – BMI

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I weigh myself in kilos, which I can understand for bags of flour and portions of fish or piles of vegetables, but they mean nothing to me in terms of body weight – maybe one of the reasons why mine crept up so steadily the last few years! It was a shock when I realised that my 68.4 kilos was about 10 stone 10 lbs – a healthy weight for me is a good way under 9 stone!

How do you know what a healthy weight is for you? Well apart from your own sense of what weight you should be to look good and feel good, you can use a BMI calculator. This will give you an estimate of your body mass. There are some new weighing machines on the market that will calculate percentage body fat, but I think unless you have a lot of money to spend, these are unreliable. BMI will only give you a range of healthy weights for your age and height, it’s up to you to decide where you need to be in that range for your body frame.

My BMI today

My BMI today

My starting BMI was 29.45 – right towards the top end of overweight  – and would have been set to continue into obese unless I had taken action.

We started on 2nd January on cutting out alcohol for the month, reducing our calorie intake and increasing our activity levels . Then fortuitously my husband saw Michael Mosley talking about the 5:2 diet on TV, as his The Fast Diet book was about to be launched. After doing some researching we both agreed it would be a fantastic way to change our lifestyles and something that we are both enthusiastic about for the long term health benefits. Being in my early 60s I am optimistic that it is not too late to reverse the trend towards diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, high blood pressure and whatever other ailments I was heading for.

The first thing though is to get rid of this excess weight  – and the 5:2 way of eating is really helping with that. I’m still calorie counting as I need to re-educate myself about portion size, which foods have hidden or surprise calories and to know that even when I am eating on a non-fast day that I am not going overboard in adding calories that my body can’t burn off.  I’m really enjoying the challenge of finding interesting, flavourful food that is filling but not fattening.

I know this is a popular diet with foodies, as it can give you the leeway to indulge yourself a little and still maintain a healthy weight. But whilst I don’t want to exclude anything in particular long term, in the short term it is worth saying NO to the wonderful French patisserie, the rich buttery pastry, the rich creamy sauces and so on, while I am working on getting to a maintenance weight.  So I am being careful, but not entirely restrictive. Weekends and the occasional night out can still include a couple of glasses of wine and something sweet. If I have burned calories by cycling or Zumba, then that gives me some spare calories that I could use. But I don’t want guzzle a whole handful of chocolates and ruin everything I have achieved so far –  and thanks to the changes that are happening to my body and brain, I don’t want to! How brilliant is that?

Yes there is some willpower required to keep going on a fast day, to wait another 15 minutes before having something to eat, to say NO to a cream cake or whatever is your weakness – but the goals of being healthy, looking good, and best of all, feeling good – well those are worth working for, worth a little short-term discomfort.

The act of fasting twice a week helps to reduce your stomach size, reduce your appetite and reduce your cravings. It makes you more mindful about what and when you eat and to not mind being a little hungry occasionally.   If you combine this with steps towards avoiding junk food, cutting back on snacking and sweetened soft drinks and replacing processed and refined foods with home-made and wholefoods wherever you can, then you will be well on the way to a really healthy lifestyle, even if you don’t take any more exercise.  It’s a journey, not an instant fix. I’m lucky to already have a lot of knowledge about food and I enjoy planning meals and preparing things from scratch, but I’m still learning about nutrition. I’m happy to share to help others to get healthy and it  encourages me too.

So keep at it. If you have read this far – I hope you will find some useful and inspiring ideas here to help you to keep going with 5:2 in the long term, along with me and my husband.

My current BMI is 27.04 – I still have a further 5 kgs to lose to get me into the healthy zone and my target is to get a little under that, to allow for a little fluctuation.

Let’s all get to a healthy BMI and keep the cost of medical care down!

You can calculate your BMI here on the NHS website.

Not going to bed hungry!

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Today was our 10th fast day. Amazing! My weight is still on a very pleasing downward trend. I love my bathroom scales at the moment! I’ve also lost another 1cm off my waist and hips in the last week or so, so I love my tape measure too! I use one that I got from free when I joined the British Heart Foundation – I’m still in the pink ‘at risk’ zone for my waist measurement, but at least I am out of the red ‘high risk’ zone now.

I’ve noticed a few people on the 5:2 Intermittent Fasting support group on Facebook saying that they are going to bed hungry and early, wishing for their breakfast to come soon. That’s certainly not the case for me. Once we’ve had our evening meal I am finding myself completely comfortable and not in the slightest bit hungry. Mid afternoon is when I usually find my stomach grumbling and rumbling, but a cup of rooibosh tea or lime and ginger tea and the feeling passes. The weather was dreary, damp and cold here again though, so I was very glad that the wood burner stove was going as I felt decidedly chilly.

Waking up the morning after I was in no particular hurry for breakfast either. I really think there is a great benefit from going 12 hours or so without filling your stomach – not just because your system gets a break from food processing and pumping out insulin, but your stomach gets used to being empty, your mind gets more used to your stomach being empty and overall it helps to decrease your appetite.

So for our fast day morning this Thursday we had a breakfast of porridge (made with water) and a dozen blackberries each, from last year’s harvest in our garden. A cup of black coffee. No sugar, no honey, no sweeteners, no milk.

During the day I drank another cup of black coffee, a couple of glasses of water, a lime and ginger tea, 2 cups of rooibosh tea.

For our evening meal we had simple vegetable soup followed by peppered smoked mackerel with poached egg, wilted spinach and steamed broccoli and carrots. For dessert we had fromage blanc with a few home grown cherries from the freezer, poached with some mixed spice. No sugar or sweetener

According to myfitnesspal, my intake was just slightly over target, at 515 calories. The mackerel was quite a lot higher in calories than I expected (my 60g fillet was 186kcal), more than twice what a piece of salmon would have been, so not really a brilliant choice for a fast day. But it was very tasty and the meal was very filling.  I think the soup to start with is a great way to break a fast and it certainly helps to fill me up.

About an hour before bed I had a cup of camomile tea, which I often find is helpful for getting a good night’s sleep.

Neither of us went to bed hungry!